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Glass door
The Glass Door is a similar to the Glass Ceiling. It is a term for a common pattern of resistence against women's multiple attempts at entering certain workplaces. There is no formal barrier preventing women from entering (hence, the glass door, the one that you don't see until you walk right into it). What makes the door so invisible *the unshakable myth that women simply don't want to enter certain industries like IT, engineering, or other STEM fields, so the absence of female employees does not immediately raise suspicions of sex discrimination *this leaves the burden on individual female potential job applicants to raise the issue, and this is risky for the following reasons: **they can be coerced into silence due to the risk of being labeled trouble-makers **this can get them blacklisted from companies, depending on how tightly-knit the local community is **they can fear for their financial independence and thus personal safety due to threats **they have male friends working in the same industry, whom they rely on for networks, so they can't risk upsetting them **the more cutting-edge the technology, the smaller and possibly more tight-knit the local developer community because not many people have adopted it yet - enterprising women that want to jump into a new language may be under more pressure socially not to piss the local community off **a woman facing a glass door situation is most likely a new grad fresh out of school with heavy loans to pay off (Catch-22 situation: she might not be able to afford keeping silent about discrimination if it means she'll be able to pay off the debt, so a backlash against her is a form of blaming the victim) *ironically, the more the woman networks, the more people may think that sexism doesn't exist anymore because she is out, engaged, and under pressure to put on a positive facade about her job hunt - it may be against her interests to reveal just how long she has been unemployed and searching *co-op programs have been heralded as the solution to the problem, even though their effectiveness is debatable *contributions to Open Source projects is rapidly replacing formal education as an indicator of merit, which is sexist as well as classist **Open Source projects are judged on a case-by-case basis and possibly just as subjectively as work portfolios in other industries, despite programming being seen culturally as objective work (developers are known to have "religious wars" amongst each other anyway for having different coding styles) **at school, you pay the professor to teach you and it's his/her job **you're accepted into schools based on academic merit **participation in Open Source, by contrast, is based more on privilege **in the Open Source community, nobody is under any obligation to help you out and its members may resist the participation of women **you have to be able to afford the time and the computer to contribute to Open Source projects **cultural biases discourage women from IT subjects at an early age *company management can go through the motions of being friendly to women, offering them tours of the office, interviewing them, but decide to go with other applicants without giving a clear answer as to why *there is no way for a female job applicant to know how the evaluation process she went through differed from that of another job candidate, ie. She relies entirely on male friends in the same industry to tell her that they were evaluated on their coding skills while her resume was picked apart for gaps that had specifically to do with her identity as a woman *company promotional materials can include faces of women and visible minorities, even though the composition of the workforce remains homogenous, so outsiders aren't aware there is a problem until they go behind the scenes *some people simply subscribe to the belief that sexism no longer exists in the 21st century *the mistaken belief that IT or other STEM fields are meritocracies *the availability of free downloads, screencasts, e-books, and documentation online to learn a particular coding language makes it seem like the door to the IT industry is wide open for the taking, though it still takes a living, breathing hiring manager to actually let you through to earn a wage *the high number of male programmers expressing how easy it is to get a job in a hot new coding language (if people assume sexism doesn't exist, they would naturally come to the conclusion that women could have just as easily done it if they wanted to) Category:Issues